Operations

Overview

So how does a district decide what to offer and what they can afford? The operations choices can be overwhelming, but as with the other items in meals offered to all students, the costs are carried by the reimbursable meals sold. Just as with any menu, the assumption is that the meal is “offer versus serve.” Not every student will take milk, not every student will take a roll, and not every student will take every item from the salad bar.

As with all meal planning, the cost of the individual components is carried by the averages of selection. If the budgeted cost per meal is $1.00, then that average may include menus that range from $1.20 to $0.80. The salad bar becomes a part of that equation. Studies of districts have shown that average costs for the salad bar per elementary student ranges from $0.16 to $0.26. The range is based on the ingredients and method of production (e.g., purchasing precut vegetables versus cutting whole products, percentage of USDA commodity foods used in the bar).

The Salad Bar Layout

Utilizing a salad bar grid layout is a great tool for ensuring consistent costs and compliance at the site level for the planned ingredient combinations. The salad bar layout examples are just a few of a multitude of salad bar configurations that could be offered.

Example of 5-well salad bar setup

Example of 4-well salad bar setup

The layouts shown here can be offered daily as part of the reimbursable meal. In this example, with the exception of a grain salad, grains are offered from the line to keep breads from drying out on the salad bar.

To make this process easier, we have created an editable 4-Well Salad Bar Set-Up Template and 5-Well Salad Bar Set-Up Template that can help you plan the salad bar layout. The template tools allow you to select the pan sizes that you have and configure layouts for either a four-well bar or a five-well bar. Using a consistent plan for ingredients offered helps you determine approximate food costs. Pre-determined salad bar layouts are also helpful in training the school teams in salad bar set-up and the salad bar’s role as a part of the reimbursable meal. Salad bar layouts can be customized to respond to the location and resources of the school site. If the district has a bar with one-sided access, selection of items will be smaller. In some districts, a mirrored approach works best for the flow of the line. Secondary schools will often support more complex choices without mirroring. In addition, the district may shift the combination of items offered to align with menu themes or to create seasonally driven selections. The salad bar is extremely flexible in that regard. Here are some additional examples of salad bar layouts, courtesy of Cloverleaf Local Schools in Ohio.

Menu Planning

Presenting meal components on the salad bar provides an exciting opportunity for menu planning. School districts exchange the canned green beans and canned fruit cocktail—often seen as the eyesore of school food—with a rainbow of fresh products. Once the salad bar becomes an assumed part of the operation, service is more efficient, directors are often creative with menu choice, and the staff is happy to take on the challenge. The key is to establish the baseline standards, train the team, and adjust for efficiency and sustainability.

Keep in mind, what kids do the first week that a salad bar is launched (eat you out of the house!) will drop and level off as they begin to see the salad bar as part of the daily meal.

Portion Size

The current USDA guidance from their March 2013 Memo SP 31-2013 helped to establish guidelines for best practices with respect to menu planning and production compliance; however, we still field many questions about portion size. In the guidelines, page 2 addresses portion size. Here are the key points:

When planning a salad bar as part of a reimbursable meal, the minimum portion sizes must be consistent with the meal pattern for the age-grade group.

Salad bars can also be used to serve one or multiple food components. It is important to remember that at least 1/8 cup of fruit or vegetable must be served to count towards the fruit or vegetable component, including those served on the salad bar.

If not pre-portioning, then the cashier must determine if the food/menu item can count toward a reimbursable meal. Schools should consider placing signage as a visual aid to help students determine what a minimum portion is for self-service items, particularly in the case of leafy greens.

Your team is already expert at recognizing eighth, quarter, half, three-quarter, and cup portions, and the students can become experts as well. When planning the salad bar set up, spoodles may seem like the best utensil to ensure proper portion sizes, but utensils should be chosen based on their ease of use. Recognizing that the salad bar components will be combined, and that ultimately we want the kids to choose several items to make up their portions of fruit and vegetables, we recommend choosing utensils that are easy for kids to use with the type of item. (Have you tried putting shredded carrots on your salad with a spoodle? It’s not ideal.) The goal should be creating a service environment that makes it easy for the students to select multiple items without loading up their tray with more than they can eat. Using posters and signs as well as sample salads to demonstrate how combining vegetables creates a creditable portion helps as well.

The Recipe

In their salad bar guidance, the USDA describes how to create a salad bar recipe:

School Food Authorities (SFAs) are not required to conduct a nutrient analysis, however, many SFAs do monitor the nutrients provided in their menus and it can be a helpful tool to determine the nutrient composition of all the foods offered in the salad bar by considering the foods together as a “recipe”. A standardized recipe is a recipe that has been carefully adapted and tested to ensure that it will produce a consistent product every time it is used. Standardized recipes can be helpful when developing recipes for food bars because they promote consistent food quality, predictable yield, control food costs and help with inventory control. Creating a standardized recipe will also simplify the nutrient analysis process. The standardized recipe should be constructed based on a typical day.

When the USDA says “considering the foods together as a ‘recipe’” what that means is that every ingredient you offer on the salad bar is included in the “recipe,” though we know that your customers probably all selected something different. One student might have only lettuce and tomato while another may choose pear, rice salad, carrots and beets. The role of the recipe in this case is to ascertain a nutrient analysis of the amounts of all the items selected by all your students over a set period of time. In our recipe, we recommend using a week of data to create the recipe. Though typically districts create recipes and then make the food, in this case you really do need offer the bar and let the students settle into a routine before the data you collect will prove to be very accurate. We recommend collecting the data using a five-day production record that tracks the product prepared and used by ingredient.

To simplify the task of measuring how much product is prepared and used we recommend creating standard measures for each product using the pan it is served in as the measure. In the example below you can see that each ingredient is identified by a pan size, the weight of the product per pan, and the serving size of the ingredient if served alone. We have found that one of the missteps of salad bar implementation is that districts do not create standard measures for the bulk pans of ingredients that are used daily in the layout. As a result, their ability to track prepared and used product is often compromised.

Sample production record

To create a unit of measure for the pans, the production crew prepped and weighed each item that is offered within the district’s salad bar layout. The line on the pan—which is approximately two-thirds up the side of the pan—is the “fill mark.” We recommend creating these standard measures for the bar because it provides speed and accuracy at the site level, both for inventory and ordering. Without any further measuring, the sites can easily determine how much of a pan is leftover, how many pans were used, etc.

The use of scales is also an accurate and an acceptable method if the school is changing pan sizes often or does not have a standardized daily layout. To use a scale to track production for the salad bar, the staff person would weigh the total product prepped before service and then weigh it again after service.

In the district where this sample production record was sourced, all 50 schools have salad bars and the regional managers review the data at the completion of each six-week cycle. The menu planner updates the recipes as needed. The ingredient measures for the recipes are based on real usage data gathered by adding together the weekly totals by ingredient and school, which are then divided by the number of meals served for the week. The recipe reflects every ingredient offered on the salad bar. This is an accurate representation of the average consumption of the salad bar ingredients in the district for the week measured.

Side salad recipe used for every day salad bar in elementary and K-8 sites (cropped)

The district also creates a fruit recipe for all the seasonal fruits that might be used during the year. This district extensively limits the use of canned fruit in the elementary grades, and it is not used at all in the secondary grades. Aside from maintaining the detailed by-item production records for development of the recipe, maintaining these records allows for the sites to develop realistic weekly produce orders. Maintaining detailed records provide accountability and cost containment by reducing over-ordering. The salad bar recipes can be found in the Recipes section.

Side of fruit recipe, which reflects the various fruit choices offered on the bar (cropped)

Production Records

As part of the reimbursable meal, the “salad bar” creates a challenge for the NSLP production records used for meal claiming. The most common accountability method is adding each ingredient offered to either your paper or digital production record with the attendant serving size for the item. Many districts will preprint all the items offered and the site manager will check or circle which items they offered and estimate how many servings of each were prepared, served and leftover.

However, that type of accountability does not reflect the way salad bars actually operate. Students do not typically choose a half-cup of carrot or a cup of lettuce. They are most likely combining several items to comprise at minimum the required serving. That is reflected quite clearly in the previous section where we discussed developing the recipe.

Another option is scheduling the “side salad” recipe and the “fruit” recipes to the production record as well as maintaining the detailed ingredient production record described earlier for accountability and efficiency. When the side salad is listed in the production record, the detailed by-item Salad Bar Production Record backs up the volume of product that was prepared and assures a state inspector that planned quantities produced were adequate for the reimbursable meals served that day. In the record the reimbursable meal count for the day is used as the “served” or “used” quantity for side salad. For example, if a site served 100 reimbursable meals, then 100 would be recorded for the line item “SB Side Elem." The fruit side can be treated the same way. This method accounts for the individual choices students make at the salad bar, which typically is more than two items.

For a la carte side salads sold, there should be an item record from the POS software to record into the “non-reimbursable” field indicating exactly how many were sold to brown baggers or adults (you may have developed a separate recipe for adults). If a school does not use a POS system, the easiest way to track those non-reimbursable salad sales is to count the side salad containers before service and then record the number used by counting the remaining containers at the end of service. That method can also be used for counting reimbursable salad bar meals if a school has not created a key for a reimbursable salad bar meal in the POS.

By-item production record

Site Level Ordering

The use of detailed daily production records is essential to the site management of salad bars. Cost over runs due to waste at the site level is one of the most common reasons that salad bar programs fail. Depending on the operational model, the site’s role in fiscal sustainability of the salad bar program is extremely important.

There is more protection against waste in a centralized production model where many or all of the salad bar products are ordered and shipped from a central kitchen. Central production allows for more efficient production of cut products, and ordering by sites is simpler because they order by standard measures of prepared product instead of raw product that they must prep on site. This is especially useful for small school sites where receiving a case of a product like cucumbers is not in scale with the rate the product is used.

In the instance where small sites must prep product from scratch, the district may need to specify to the vendor that broken cases or buying product by the pound will be required. Another solution includes splitting cases between sites—one site receives the full case, splits it, and then a driver moves the balance of the case to the other site. Tracking expenses by site can be challenging via this method, but they can be tracked through inventory transfers and maintaining site accounting codes on the invoices.

The USDA’s Food Buyers Guide, which is now available in an online tool, is helpful in estimating the edible portion of many commonly used salad bar vegetables. Accurate salad bar production recordkeeping is the quickest way to ascertain actual needs. You can also customize the Salad Bar Site Produce Projection Tool by scaling the yield of key vegetable ingredients in the salad bar recipe.